Mongrels

by Stephen Graham Jones

Babyface. That’s what you always call a werewolf who was out getting in six different kinds of trouble the night before. That’s how you know what they’ve been doing. That’s how you pick those ones out of a room.”

It made me wonder about the other way around, if a good man meant a bad wolf. And if that was better or worse.

This is Alabama. It smells like old water, so everybody smokes cigarettes all the time.

Read right before I drove to Alabama!

Darren’s howl shook me awake in the morning. He was hanging sideways in my doorway, the worst alarm clock ever. “Going to miss the bus,” he said.

This made me laugh.

You still go to school, I told myself, and rolled out, into that charade, and halfway through brushing my teeth, instead of checking my tongue like I always did, for if it was flattening out, if it was getting that blurry black stripe down the middle, this time I rubbed my jaw in the mirror. I was just like the sheep, walking through the steps of a life where I was just pretending. I wasn’t a sheep, though. I bared my teeth to prove it.

“Being a werewolf isn’t just teeth and claws,” she said, her lips brushing my ear she was so close, so quiet, “it’s inside. It’s how you look at the world. It’s how the world looks back at you.”